Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman (1958 - 1981), a prodigious talent, made her first mature photograph at the age of thirteen and created a body of work that has been critically acclaimed in the years since her death. Born into a family of artists in Boulder, Colorado, she also spent much of her childhood in Italy.

Much of Woodman's work was produced as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, where she studied from 1975-1978. During this time she had solo exhibitions at Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts in 1976 and her thesis exhibition at Woods-Gerry Gallery, RISD, in 1978. From 1977-78, Woodman lived in Rome as part of the RISD Rome Honors Program, presenting a solo exhibition at Libreria Maldoror in 1978. She moved to New York in 1979. She was a fellow at the prestigious MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire during the summer of 1980. During her lifetime, Woodman was included in group exhibitions at Galleria Ugo Ferrante, Rome, 1978; Daniel Wolf, Inc, New York, 1980; and the Alternative Museum, New York, 1980, where she presented the Temple Project, the largest and most complex from her diazotype series now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Her artist's book, Some Disordered Interior Geometries, was published by Synapse Press in 1981.

The first solo museum exhibition of Woodman's work was presented at the Wellesley College Museum, Massachusetts and Hunter College Art Gallery, New York in 1986. This seminal exhibition began a robust museum interest in Woodman's work that continues in the present. Other notable solo museum exhibitions include the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, 1998, which toured throughout Europe and a major U.S. retrospective at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2011 and the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2012.  Francesca Woodman: On Being an Angel was organized by and presented at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm in 2015 and travelled to several European cities. Woodman has been included in numerous group exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America.

Francesca Woodman, a comprehensive monograph with an essay by Chris Townsend, was published by Phaidon Press in 2006. Woodman's photographs are included in major museum collections including Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Detroit Institute of Arts; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Tate Gallery, London; Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris; National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh; and Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris.